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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Let's start with the new chip. In its earlier discussions of the Bobcat core, AMD talked about it appearing in the "Ontario" APU, which originally was aimed at netbooks and low-power notebooks. Ontario will feature two Bobcat cores, along with a DirectX 11-capable graphics engine, a unified video decoder and the traditional platform interfaces for memory and the bus, in a single chip, initially manufactured on TSMC's 40nm process. The company now says this chip will require 9 watts of TDP (total desktop power, in AMD's measuring) and is quite clearly aimed at netbooks and small form factor desktops.

The new chip is called "Zacate," and it is apparently a higher-power version, requiring 18 watts of TDP, also with two Bobcat cores and the GPU, and aimed at ultrathin, mainstream, and value notebooks as well as desktops and all-in-ones. Both are part of the previously announced "Brazos" platform.

At the show, AMD displayed the chip, and showed pictures of the die and the chip, for size comparison. (see above)

AMD says it is ramping production of these chips at TSMC now, and they should be in systems in early 2011.

To the extent that Zacate is being aimed at the mainstream notebook market, it seems to repositioning the forthcoming "Llano" chip, which was originally supposed to be the company's first "fusion" APU. Llano is a higher-end chip, with up to 4 CPUs (based on a modified version of AMD's current "Stars" core, used in the company's current chips) plus graphics, to be manufactured on Globalfoundries' 32nm process. Originally Llano was positioned as being for a range of notebooks from "thin and light" to desktop replacements, but I wonder if most of the thin notebook wouldn't be better suited for Zacate, which appears to be ready sooner; leaving Llano aimed more at higher-power notebooks (as part of the "Sabine" platform) and mainstream desktops (as part of the "Lynx" platforms) Of course, we won't know until we see real products, and know for certain their performance and power use.

Llano does appear to have slipped a bit, but at the Globalfoundries Global Technology Conference last week, AMD talked up the chip, along with the challenges of combining high-frequency CPUs with GPUs.

In that talk, AMD Sr. VP Chekib Akrout also talked about the challenges of chip scaling in the future, saying the graphics "has an insatiable demand for compute power" which in turn causes a need for increasing density. He said the industry as a whole needed to decide which technologies to invest in, citing such areas as FinFETs (a new design for transistors), denser memories, and photonics. In particular, he said the industry is on the horizon of die stacking, with multiple dies combined, with interconnects between them .

Akrout also showed a die photo of "Orochi," which will be the implementation of the Bulldozer cores, in dies that will have 8 integer processing units (along with 4 floating point units). It will be aimed at servers (with a single-die version called Valencia and a dual-die version called Interlagos) and at higher-end desktops (where it will be called Zambezi), where it will be paired with discrete graphics.

All these code names can be a bit confusing, as AMD's roadmap is getting more complicated. And of course, Intel is readying a new set of products for next year as well, with its second generation 32nm products using its "Sandy Bridge" core that also combines CPU and GPU cores. I expect we'll get more details on the specific chips and the "Cougar Point" platform built around it at the Intel Developer Forum next week.

With the combination of CPU and GPU functions into single chips; with server chips getting more and more cores; and with new lower-power chips aiming at both notebooks and servers, 2011 promises to be a very interesting year for microprocessors.

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